Study of a scheduling policy for diverse deadline-based quality of service

One of the most challenging problems in ATM network design is providing div ersified Quality of Service (QoS) to applications with distinct characteris tics. Buffer management schemes can play a significant role in providing th e necessary diversification through the employed cell admission and service policy. A flexible priority service policy for two applications (classes) with strict - and in general distinct - deadlines and different deadline vi olation rates is studied in this paper. The proposed policy is a generaliza tion of the shortest time to extinction (STE) policy (or the Earliest Due D ate policy which discards expired cells), which is more flexible in providi ng diversified QoS. The relationship of this policy to other standard ones is also discussed. A flexible numerical analysis is presented for the deriv ation of performance measures such as cell loss, mean cell-delay and the ta il of the cell-delay probability distribution for each class. Numerical res ults illustrate the effectiveness of the studied priority scheme. Finally, a low-complexity implementation scheme is proposed, which does not require time-stamp-based sorting. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.